On 30 July 1914, it suddenly dawned on Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany was on the threshold of a war with three great powers. Panicking, he grabbed a recently arrived dispatch from St Petersburg and committed his agonised thoughts to paper in a frenzy of marginal scribbles. England was the author of Germany's predicament, he scrawled. Over the years, it had gradually tightened a net of alliances around the unsuspecting Germans. Now, in its perfidy, it claimed to find in Germany's loyalty to Austria-Hungary the pretext for a war of annihilation. As if all this were not painful enough, the malign intelligence behind the plot had been the kaiser's uncle, King Edward VII, who had died in 1910:

LRB 22 October 2009 | PDF Download